Shrouded in the darkness of April 3, multiple columns of thousands of Robert E. Lee’s veteran troops, ragged and many shoeless, set out under the Virginia night sky, marching from Richmond, Petersburg, and other nearby Confederate positions. Riding among his men on his horse, Traveler, Lee had reason to be confident. After departing their trenches quickly and under the cover of darkness, the general and his veteran army had at least a twelve-hour jump on Grant and Sheridan. Every mile the men marched would be another mile from the Union supply center at City Point, straining Union supply lines, and closer to linking up with General Joseph E. Johnston’s army. For years, and in countless engagements, the Confederates had outmarched their opponents.
The war had devolved into a footrace. Could Lee reach Johnston or divide his army and escape into the mountains? Throughout the Civil War, and most wars, retreating armies could flee faster than the pursuing army. The Army of Northern Virginia marched toward Amelia Court House, where supplies and precious food awaited the starving soldiers. Supply was essential and became unum necessarium; Lee’s men only had one day’s rations.
After the Battle of Five Forks, Young and his men continued to be Sheridan’s eyes and ears, perilously riding deep into the columns of Lee’s retreating army. On April 3, Young and six Jessie Scouts followed the army several miles from Five Forks. In the midst of the retreat, Confederate brigadier general Rufus Barringer’s North Carolinians put up a desperate rear guard to allow thousands of their fellow Confederates time to escape near Namozine Church.
Sergeant McCabe yelled to Rowand, “We are going up to the next house to get something to eat. You wait here for Young.” Suddenly the Rhode Island officer appeared, and Young pointed a double-barreled shotgun at Rowand, either in jest or mistaking him for a Confederate. Rowand then turned to his superior and said, “Why, look down at the woods!” A Confederate officer and his staff rode through the trees. Young then barked, “McCabe and the boys are in the next house getting something to eat. You go down after them and bring them back here quick and I’ll go down and talk to these men.”1
As Rowand rode to get McCabe, he came across Barringer riding a gray horse in the woods, separated from the retreating Confederate forces. “General, what command?”
“The NC Brigade. What command do you belong to?”
“Fitzhugh Lee’s. We got scattered yesterday,” responded Rowand.
“Any more of your men around?”
“Yes. Half a dozen.”
“We better all get together,” exclaimed the general.2
Just then Young and McCabe rode up. Rowand introduced Young as Major Grandstaff, giving him the identity of the officer who had captured Jessie Scout Thomas Cassidy at Woodstock weeks earlier. The Scouts always had a cover story and false identification.
Despite being near thousands of retreating Confederates, the ever-audacious Young cheerfully approached the dignified Southern officer with, “Good afternoon, General.” The pompous Barringer responded coldly, “You have the advantage of me, sir.”
“You’re right I have, General,”3 laughed Young as he pointed his Colt at the general’s face.
Under the unwritten rules of scouting, Barringer’s horse belonged to Rowand or Young. But McCabe tried to claim the horse. Rowand recalled, “McCabe and I had some words about it, and I pulled my revolver, and I told him to ride out, and we would settle it on the spot.” Young intervened and declared, “The horses are Rowand’s, if he wants them. All of them.”4
Avoiding retreating Confederates, Young and his men brought their prize, the general and his staff, back to Federal lines. Angered by being duped into captivity, Barringer snapped to Colonel James W. Forsyth, Sheridan’s chief of staff, “Scouts are spies. I would hang every one of them if I caught them.” Forsyth countered, “You won’t catch them during this war.”5
That night Rowand gave the beautiful gray horse to Forsyth, and Barringer went into captivity. Barringer was the first Confederate general taken prisoner on Lee’s retreat and was dined and treated respectfully by Grant’s chain of command, ultimately meeting President Lincoln himself.
Young and his men were back at it the next day. This time disguised in the uniform of a Confederate colonel who had been captured, Young met another colonel from North Carolina, William H. Cheek, who informed him of Barringer’s capture by the Yankees. “He, the colonel, did not exactly bewail the fate of Barringer. ‘For’ said he, ‘I am to command; I take his place.’ ”
“Oh no!” Young responded. “You do not take his place; you go to the place where he is!”6 Along with the haul came the capture of Barringer’s brigade flag, which was seized by former Confederate cavalryman and now civilian Jessie Scout William Woodall.*
This would not be the last time the Scouts would capture Confederates. Young sent his Scouts to act as guides leading Confederates toward Union lines, à la Jessie Scout Jack Sterry, who had earlier tried to convince General Hood to take the wrong road to Manassas. The major’s efforts proved successful; “a whole corral of Johnnies”7 were captured whom the Scouts turned over to the advancing infantry.
The Scouts were not the only ones capturing combatants on the battlefield. General John Brown Gordon remembered his experience with two Jessie Scouts. Gordon’s scout named George found two men whom he suspected were Jessie Scouts loitering near Gordon’s men and had them arrested on the retreat during the night. He brought the two young men to Gordon, who personally questioned them, “finding no grounds for George’s suspicions.” Gordon peppered them with questions. They had plausible answers for everything and what appeared to be authentic furlough papers signed by Lee. Everything appeared in order. Gordon seemed inclined to let them go when the Confederate scout protested, “No, General, they are not all right. I saw them by the starlight counting your [men marching in] files.” As the Confederates and captured Scouts marched in the darkness, they happened upon a burning log heap set by troops who passed the area earlier on the retreat. The moment the firelight touched the faces of the two young men, George shouted, “General, these are the men that captured me nearly two months ago behind General Grant’s headquarters.”8
Gordon ordered the men searched from head to toe, examining the seams of their clothing down to their boots. Initially, George found nothing. After peeling off the lining of one of the Jessie Scout’s boots, he discovered an order from Grant to Major General Edward Ord instructing him to cut off Lee’s retreat to Appomattox. Once the damning papers were found, the Scouts admitted they had captured George. “Well, you know your fate. Under the laws of war, you have forfeited your lives wearing this uniform, and I shall have you shot at sunrise tomorrow morning,” Gordon stated. The Scouts, no more than twenty years of age, said with perfect composure, “General, we understand it all. We knew when we entered this kind of service and put on these uniforms, that we should be executed if we were captured. You have the right to have us shot; but the war can’t last much longer, and it would do you no good to have us killed.”9 Gordon sent a message to Lee informing him of the capture of the Jessie Scouts and requested that their lives be spared. Lee concurred, and the captured Federals made the arduous retreat with Gordon and his men.
In the race south, Sheridan beat Lee to the punch thanks to information provided by his Scouts. “[Young] kept me constantly informed of the movements of the enemy and brought in prisoners from brigadier-generals down. The information gained through him was invaluable,”10 wrote Sheridan. Riding with the Jessie Scouts and an escort of 200 of the 1st US Cavalry, the Union general reached the crossroads town of Jettersville, Virginia, before the Union infantry of V Corps and Lee’s army. Realizing the importance of the vital crossroads, Little Phil quickly positioned his small force to hold the crossroads until the bulk of his forces arrived. Then fate interceded. Sheridan’s men captured a Confederate scout riding a mule toward Burkeville. Hidden in his boot was a telegram: “The army is at Amelia Court House, short of provisions, Send 300,000 rations quickly to Burkeville Junction.”11
Sheridan hoped to use the contents of the captured note to his advantage. “My troops were hard up for rations, for in the pursuit we could not wait for our trains, so I concluded to secure, if possible, these provisions intended for Lee. To this end, I directed Young to send four of his best scouts to Burkeville Junction. There they were to separate, two taking the railroad toward Lynchburg and two toward Danville, and as soon as a telegraph station was reached the telegram was to be transmitted as it had been written, and the provisions hurried forward.”12 Sheridan would then seize the precious food for his army and resume the pursuit of Lee. To that end, Joe McCabe and Jim White rode toward Lynchburg and two other Scouts toward Danville to deliver Lee’s message to a telegraph operator and find the supply trains.
When Lee’s famished and exhausted men arrived at Amelia Court House on the morning of April 4 and opened the supply train’s boxcars, they contained scores of loaded caissons, hundreds of crates of ammunition, and boxes of worthless artillery harnesses, but no food. One theory holds the mistake stemmed from an administrative mix-up; another posits that Young’s Scouts redirected the trains.13 The source of the error remains a mystery to this day. Nevertheless, the lack of supplies, crucial as any in war, threatened to derail the Army of Northern Virginia’s retreat and affect the course of the conflict. Starving men were expected to march for their lives and fight. Lee relayed desperate orders to send provisions and ordered his men to forage the countryside. Precious time was lost. Then Lee ordered his men to march toward Jettersville, only for his advance elements to find that Sheridan had beaten him there. Rather than fight Sheridan, he fatefully decided to move in another direction—west toward Farmville and the promise of rations for his famished army.
Sheridan also targeted Lee’s horse-drawn supply wagons. On the night of April 4, Sheridan sent all his available Scouts to hunt for them. At Clemmens Bridge, the Scouts found a long line of wagons camped and ready to roll at daylight for Amelia Court House, where Lee’s army bivouacked. Sheridan ordered all the Jessie Scouts and a division of cavalry to hit the wagons. With the Scouts leading the vanguard, they found the wagon train at Painesville Crossroads between Clemmens Bridge and Amelia Court House. Charging across an open field, James Campbell rode alongside wagons blazing away with his Colts. He captured a large battle flag. Battling Confederates, he seized another flag.
During the clash, twenty-two-year-old Jessie Scout Corporal William John Brewer of Company C, 2nd New York Cavalry, “captured an engineer flag.”14 Brewer enlisted at the beginning of the war and had survived a gunshot wound to the left side during the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid, as Kilpatrick’s orderly. According to Rowand, the Federals took “five pieces of artillery, two hundred wagons, and a large number of prisoners.” After the sharp skirmish, Rowand laughingly turned to Campbell and said, “There goes your furlough now.” Campbell laconically responded, “I’ve got no time for a furlough now.”15 Soon afterward, Sheridan tapped Campbell for a crucial mission.
Finding that Sheridan had blocked the roads at Jettersville, Lee pushed his troops westward to the limits of human endurance to avoid Union infantry and Sheridan’s cavalry. The Scouts alerted Sheridan to Lee’s change of direction, and he ordered troops to block the path.
General George Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac, ill with indigestion and riding in a wagon, disagreed and believed Lee to still be at Amelia Court House, so he planned to attack the empty town the next morning. The Jessie Scouts furnished Sheridan with superior, real-time intelligence that Lee’s troops were on the move to Farmville. Frustrated, Sheridan sent James Campbell to find Grant with a note: “I wish you were here yourself. I feel confident of capturing the Army of Northern Virginia if we exert ourselves, I see no escape for Lee.”16 In such a fluid battlespace, communication between the various elements of Grant’s army and the Jessie Scouts played a vital and indispensable role; at great peril, they could move in and out of the retreating Confederate forces.
Suddenly, in that role a horseman in full Confederate uniform appeared at Grant’s headquarters and caused a commotion. Scores of weapons were pointed at the rider as anxious Federals intercepted him. However, Grant’s staff officer, Brigadier General Horace Porter, recognized a familiar face. “How do you do, Campbell?” he exclaimed, waving his men off and explaining he was “all right and was one of our own people.”17
Grant immediately recognized Campbell, and the Scout pulled out of his mouth a gooey wad of chewing tobacco, broke it in half, and teased out of the mass a tiny ball of tinfoil. Campbell unfurled Sheridan’s dispatch, then Grant read it and told the men he would join Sheridan at once, ordering Campbell to lead the way. The Jessie Scout had just delivered a crucial piece of tactical intelligence—and Grant acted on it.
Ditching his pony, named Jefferson Davis, Grant called up his big black bay horse, Cincinnati, and away they went with a handful of staff and fourteen cavalrymen into enemy territory. Riding along dark, unsecured roads through pockets of retreating Rebels, Grant took the great risk of capture or death, which seemed worth the cost considering the real chance of Lee’s escape. Campbell led the cavalcade through sixteen miles of darkness to Sheridan. These actions, among others, including saving Young at Woodstock months earlier, in time earned the Jessie Scout the Medal of Honor for extraordinary heroism.18
For the past several days, Sheridan’s cavalry had doggedly pursued the Army of Northern Virginia, racing alongside it and hitting vulnerable retreating Rebel units. At Jettersville, Grant countermanded Meade’s orders and made the decision that instead of shadowing the Confederates, Sheridan would get ahead of them to cut off their routes of escape and means of supply. Sheridan’s current orders from Meade would have allowed Lee to escape. Sheridan’s cavalry headed toward Deatonsville and what would become known as the Battle of Little Sailor’s Creek. Sheridan planned to have a corps of infantry bring up the rear in a pincer movement intended to envelop the Army of Northern Virginia.
After bringing Grant to Sheridan, James Campbell turned in for a few hours of much-needed sleep. He slept next to Rowand, and during the night as the men slumbered, someone stole Campbell’s flags and Rowand’s revolvers. Finding another set of Colts, the Scouts saddled up. “Sheridan not only had the Johnnies on the jump but he had his scouts on the jump night and day.”19
Hungry, tired, and angry, the surly Confederates were unbowed. One salty Yale-educated Southern officer recalled the mood: “Over sir? Over? Why sir, it’s just begun. We are now where a good many of us have for a good while longed to be: Richmond gone, nothing to take care of, foot loose and thank God, out of those miserable lines! … Let them come.”20
Come the Federals did, on April 6, at three fields of battle that would collectively become known as Little Sailor’s Creek.21 Using information from the Jessie Scouts, Sheridan effectively cut off several elements of Lee’s army near the creek. While the Union infantry 2nd and VI Corps approached from the east, the infantry attacked John Brown Gordon’s division as their supply trains slowly crossed bridges near the creek. The fighting was desperate and hand to hand. “By the time we had well settled into our old position we were attacked simultaneously, front and rear, by overwhelming numbers, and quicker than I can tell it the battle degenerated into a butchery and a confused melee of brutal personal conflicts. I saw numbers of men kill each other with bayonets and the butts of muskets, and even bite each other’s throats and ears and noses, rolling on the ground like wild beasts,”22 recalled one Confederate combatant. Lines crumbled. Thousands of Confederates had been killed or captured thus far. Some units broke and fled.
From his saddle, watching the carnage unfold, Lee shouted, “My God! Has the army been dissolved?”23
One of his officers, William Mahone, turned to him and said, “No general, here are troops ready to do their duty.”24
Grabbing a battle flag, Lee rode out to rally his faltering men. Earlier, a handful of flag bearers had already fallen carrying the same standard. The flag flapped in the wind, bathing the general in the stars and bars as he rode toward his men.
There was immediately silence among the nearby men.
“It’s General Lee.”25
This was followed by a bellowing cry, “Where’s the man who won’t follow Uncle Robert!”26 The men rallied, saving a portion of the Army of Northern Virginia and allowing it to escape after sustaining devasting losses. The Confederate defeat would become immortalized as Black Thursday.
Sheridan sensed blood and moved in for the kill, sending a Scout with a dispatch to Grant: “If the thing is pressed I think Lee will surrender.” Grant passed on the message to Lincoln, who laconically responded, “Let the thing be pressed.”27
Lee’s army raced toward Farmville, a town that rested astride the swollen Appomattox River. Behind the mighty river, Lee’s tattered army hoped to regroup and inhale rations that awaited the ravished troops. High Bridge spanned the river and led into the town and potential freedom. A wonder of engineering, with train tracks above and a wagon bridge below, the steel-and-wood trestle rose 126 feet over the Appomattox and spanned half a mile of the valley. The crucial choke point became an objective of both armies. On April 6, the Federals dispatched three companies of the 4th Massachusetts Cavalry under the command of Colonel Francis Washburn, a former officer with the California Battalion, along with two regiments of infantry, to torch the structure before the Confederates could cross it. To squash the threat, General Longstreet sent Major General Thomas Rosser and his cavalry division. Scouts in the area warned Washburn that Rosser was on the way to intercept them. As Washburn approached the structure, strong earthen redoubts manned by Confederates blocked the entrance to the bridge. The cavalry officer soon heard gunfire behind him and found his infantry under attack from Rosser’s Division. McCausland’s and Thomas T. Munford’s troopers dismounted and assailed the Federal infantrymen. Vastly outnumbered, Washburn nonetheless ordered his eighty horsemen to suicidally charge the Confederates. Cavalrymen such as mustang lieutenant Allen F. Belcher and others found themselves thrust into mortal hand-to-hand combat. Belcher received a severe saber slash across his face. A Confederate blasted Washburn in the mouth and hacked his skull with a sword.28 The infantry fell back for a final stand. But the Confederates annihilated the force, seizing nearly 800 prisoners, six battle flags, and a brass band of musicians.
Rosser saved the bridge—for the time being—as retreating Confederate troops streamed across all day and night. Engineers assigned to the bridge’s destruction did not receive orders until the last minute to destroy it. Confederate pioneers felled portions of the mighty railroad bridge but fired the wagon bridge too late, and men of the 19th Maine Infantry charged into a hail of gunfire and seized the flaming wagon bridge below the railroad trestle. Using water from canteens, tarps from tents, and anything they could get their hands on, the Federals extinguished the flames. The capture of the wagon bridge below the High Bridge would prove crucial and one of the most important small-unit actions of the Appomattox Campaign. With the bridge in Union hands, nothing stopped the Federal army from pursuing Lee’s ragged, hungry, and diminished force. Both Lee and Sheridan raced for the elusive supply trains from Lynchburg.
General George Crook, recently exchanged for a Confederate prisoner, now commanded one of Sheridan’s divisions, and he pounced on the retreating Confederate wagon trains. An intense battle led to the capture of one of Sheridan’s cavalry commanders and nearly the destruction of one of the regiments, but with the Federals blocking the way to Danville, Lee’s beleaguered army marched toward Lynchburg. At Prospect Station, Crook’s and Sheridan’s other divisions united. Jessie Scout James White29 galloped up to Sheridan with dramatic news: McCabe and White had found Lee’s supply trains—four trains, loaded with supplies for Lee’s starving army. With the original dispatch orders in hand, the Jessie Scouts, dressed as Confederates, persuaded the conductors to move the trains east of Appomattox Station, where they could be seized. Sheridan’s plan a couple of days earlier of sending two teams of Jessie Scouts down the tracks was about to contribute to ending the war. Sheridan immediately dispatched the priceless intelligence about the trains’ location, and cavalry under Custer’s command seized the trains and Lee’s best hope of supplying his starving army.
The advancing Federals pushed Lee’s army into an area that resembled a jug turned on its side: a narrow seven-mile corridor flanked by the Appomattox and James Rivers. Escape for Lee’s entire army became more difficult with each hour that passed as more Federal troops arrived near the Confederates. Thanks to the Jessie Scouts’ accurate intelligence, Sheridan positioned his men as the cork on the top of the jug to block Lee’s path to the supply trains and Lynchburg. Faced with envelopment, Lee tasked General John Brown Gordon with an attack to break through Sheridan’s position.
On Palm Sunday, April 9, a fog lingered over the fields as General Gordon assembled his men. Stretching almost a mile, Gordon’s infantry and Fitzhugh Lee’s cavalry attacked Sheridan’s troopers, who fought from behind makeshift barricades. Gordon’s attack was Lee’s last hope for escape with his army intact: escape to Lynchburg or even the mountains that lay beyond. Most urgently the attack hoped to reach Lee’s supply trains, though Lee couldn’t have known they were already captured by Custer’s cavalry. The Confederates bore down on the Federals, who peppered them with their seven-shot Spencers and other weapons. For two hours, the two sides clashed, but Gordon’s men failed to break through. Sheridan appeared at the front and, satisfied with his men’s positions, rode off without saying a word. But his presence alone inspired, “reinforcing the command equal to its own numbers, by the confidence the men received in him,”30 recalled one trooper.
Frustrated by the stalwart defense, the Confederates tried to flank the center, which was held by a brigade of Sheridan’s cavalry. Unable to hold against the superior numbers of enemy infantry, the troopers began to lose the field to the Confederates. Suddenly, a voice cried out, “Keep up your courage, boys; the infantry is coming right along—in two columns—black and white—side by side—a regular checkerboard.”31 Black Americans from the US Colored Troops attached to the XXIV Corps had marched all night and moved into position to check the Confederates. “How refreshing the sight of their black countenances at this time. At the spectacle, the rebel host staggered back, and their whole line wavered as if each man was terror-struck,”32 recalled one joyous cavalryman.
A courier from Gordon brought a message: “Tell General Lee I have fought my corps to a frazzle, and I fear I can do nothing unless I am heavily supported by Longstreet’s corps.”33
A day earlier, on April 8, Grant had sent Lee a letter appealing to the Southern commander’s honor to avoid further bloodshed. Lee and his officers discussed the army’s options to surrender or go down fighting. Twenty-nine-year-old brigadier general Edward Porter Alexander urged Lee to disperse the army and conduct guerrilla warfare as Jefferson Davis had directed. Lee listened to Alexander’s impassioned pleas. “If there is any hope for the Confederacy it is in delay. For if the Army of Northern Virginia surrenders every other will surrender as fast as the news reaches it. For it is the morale of this army which has supported the whole of the Confederacy.”34
When Lee asked Alexander how many would escape, he responded, “Two-thirds of us, I think would get away. We would scatter like rabbits and partridges in the woods, and they could not scatter to catch us.”35
Lee himself had once boasted that if the army escaped to the Blue Ridge Mountains, he could fight for twenty years. Strategically, Davis’ plan for guerrilla war had merit. The stakes, as Lee considered his options near Appomattox, were enormous.
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are replete with successful insurgencies that prevailed against occupying empires and massive armies—Afghanistan, China, the Middle East, and Vietnam, to name a few. Some conflicts shifted from irregular to conventional war. Ultimately, many insurgencies wore down the occupier. A guerrilla war in the South could have been one of the bloodiest in history and taken years to resolve. The North would have had to occupy a land mass larger than western Europe filled with mountains, swamps, and forests ideal for insurgent warfare and a population friendly to guerrillas but hostile to the occupiers. Southerners who previously had their homes burned, their industry ravaged, and hundreds of thousands of their sons slain had a rabid hatred for the North.
By 1865, despite the North’s massive armies, they only occupied a small portion of the South. In any potential occupation of the South, the Federals would have tried to control the major cities while the countryside would have been hostile. There would not have been enough Union troops to hold both. Patrols leaving the cities would have been subject to attack. Smaller outposts needed to protect the population that had to be won over could potentially have been overwhelmed by Confederate forces. The grinding bloodbath would have taken years to resolve, all the bigger a challenge considering the war-weariness in the North, which could enflame the “fire in the rear” from the Copperhead movement. Arguably, paramilitary movements such as the Ku Klux Klan and Red Shirt movement could have achieved political aims and control throughout the South using terror, intimidation, and violence, as they ultimately did during the Jim Crow era. In 1865, the war could have devolved into several modes of a kinetic insurgency.
One version resembled the landscape of war-torn Missouri. Here, in the caldron that birthed the Jessie Scouts, neighbor fought against neighbor in what was known as “the war of 10,000 nasty little incidents.” Determining friend from foe became difficult, sparking a cycle of violence, revenge killings, and house burnings. As in the simmering clannish feuds that existed in the eastern portion of West Virginia and gave birth to Blazer’s Scouts, the Union would have needed to raise scores of similar counterinsurgency units. After four years of bloody combat, the contest seemed a forever war with no sense of closure.
Alternatively, the insurgency could also have been fought by Mosby-style unconventional warfare. The highly disciplined Confederate units could have attacked supply lines and roving patrols in the countryside and potentially been used to intimidate Union sympathizers. Multiple cells of hundreds of men spread out across the South could tie down tens of thousands, as Mosby had demonstrated: a force multiplier many times their number.
The North would not have been safe either, with industry subject to sabotage. Cities were vulnerable to arson, such as in the attempt on New York in 1864 by Confederate operatives. A divided United States was also very much in the interest of world powers. And Mexico, with its large foreign army of French troops under the control of Maximilian I, could have acted as a potential sanctuary for guerrilla fighters and a source of supply.
After Gordon’s failed attempt to break through Sheridan’s lines, Lee listened intently to his subordinates. “Country be damned! There is no country, general, for a year or more. You are the country to these men. They have fought for you,”36 snapped former Virginia governor Henry Wise. Grant also recognized Lee’s enormous power to determine the South’s path; hence his determination to capture or destroy Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Lee, instead, saw a future drenched in blood. Considering the possibility of ongoing guerrilla action, he raised the paramount issue of supply: “The men would be without rations and under no control of officers.… They would be compelled to rob and steal to live. They would become … bands of marauders.”37
General Edward Porter Alexander appealed to Lee to continue the struggle. Known for priding himself on following the civilian chain of command, Lee would take the extraordinary step of shattering it. Lee responded to Alexander, “As Christian men, General Alexander, you and I have no right to think for one moment of our personal feelings or affairs. We must consider only the effect our action will have upon our country at large.” Generally never a proponent of guerrilla warfare because it typically got dirty and undisciplined, Lee proclaimed, “And as for myself, you young fellows might go bushwhacking, but the only dignified course for me would be to go to General Grant and surrender myself and take the consequences of my acts.… I would rather die a thousand deaths.”38 “How easily I could get rid of all of this and be at rest. I have only to ride along the lines and all will be over.” Tears flowed from his generals’ eyes as Lee profoundly ended the discussion with a deep sigh: “But it is our duty to live. What will become of the women and children of the South, if we are not here to protect them.”39
Refusing to act on Jefferson Davis’ orders, one man, through his personal agency, would change history. Lee sent out bearers with white flags requesting a ceasefire and a meeting with Grant.
Lee and Grant met at the McLean House in the early afternoon of April 9. In 1861, the owner, Wilmer McLean, ironically had a home located in the heart of the Manassas Battlefield but moved to Appomattox to avoid the war. During the surrender negotiations, Lee brought up the issue of supplies for his starving men: “[My men] have been living for the last few days principally upon parched corn, and we are badly in need of rations and forage. I telegraphed to Lynchburg, directing several train loads of rations to be sent on rails from there, and when they arrive, I should be glad to have the present wants of my men supplied from them.”40
“All eyes turned to Sheridan,”41 whose Jessie Scouts had located and detained the all-important supply trains, impairing the ability of the Army of Northern Virginia to continue the fight in a conventional or unconventional manner. Nothing about Lee’s retreat or surrender was preordained, and Sheridan’s Jessie Scouts played a crucial† role in bringing it to a conclusion.
Grant made rations available to Lee’s men. The mark of a true statesman, his terms at Appomattox were generous and farsighted. Instead of treating the Confederates like traitors and sending them into prisoner-of-war pens, he offered parole, officers could retain their swords and sidearms, and the men could keep their horses. Some would likely fight on, but Grant saw that as a risk he was willing to take. Most men went home. Pettiness and hatred put aside, the Confederates were welcomed back into the Union with honor. The reunification of America started at Appomattox.
Grant ordered a formal surrender ceremony: a grand review of the stacking of arms and relinquishing of the Confederate colors. Gordon would return the two young Jessie Scouts he had captured to Sheridan before leading the parade of Confederate divisions on the outskirts of the rolling farmland of Appomattox. He led some 28,000 members of Lee’s army in a simple yet profound seven-hour ceremony. Grant placed the hero of Little Round Top at Gettysburg and Medal of Honor recipient Brigadier General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain in charge of the ceremony. Chamberlain later described their former foes as they marched before his Federal troops: “In proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood … thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond.”42
Chamberlain spontaneously ordered “carry arms” to the Union soldiers as a sign of deep respect for their vanquished foes marching before them. Gordon, “with heavy spirit,” faced Chamberlain and wheeled his horse. The “rider made one motion, the horse’s head swung down with a graceful bow, and General Gordon dropped his sword point to his toe in salutation,”43 recalled the Maine officer.
Stillness and silence pervaded the field. “Honor answering honor,”44 wrote Chamberlain.‡
But the war was not over. Even after Lee surrendered, Confederate armies, consisting of more than 175,000 men under multiple commands, continued to fight throughout the Confederacy. For weeks, Davis’ rickety train, holding the government of the Confederacy, rolled down the tracks from one temporary capital to another. Other elements of the Confederacy answered President Davis’ call for unconventional warfare with special operations that still had the potential to change the course of history.
* Woodall would receive the Medal of Honor for his actions, and the flag now resides in the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh.
† Sheridan would later highlight Young: “I desire to make special mention of the valuable services of Major H. H. Young, Second Rhode Island Infantry, chief of my scouts, during the cavalry expedition from Winchester, Va., to the James River. His personal gallantry and numerous conflicts with the enemy won the admiration of the whole command.… I earnestly request that he be made a lieutenant-colonel by brevet.” OR, Vol. XLVI, Pt. I, Chap. LVIII, 1113.
‡ Both Chamberlain and Gordon would fulfill their duty to live after the war. Gordon was elected US Democratic senator of Georgia and became the alleged titular leader of Georgia’s Ku Klux Klan, the living embodiment of the so-called Lost Cause narrative, and Chamberlain served as governor of Maine.